We think it’s a no-brainer to say that a customer-first approach to business is the surest way to thrive today. Products and services are in abundance, so the only thing that sets you apart is how well your users perceive you.
Both, customer service and customer success aim at making product use seamless for users. And both of them are equally crucial for a brand’s success. A happy customer experience involves on-time customer service and preemptive customer success initiatives.
The difference between customer service and customer success lies in their inherent goals and KPIs to achieve. Both of these functions are heavily reliant on each other to ensure customers have a positive brand perception.
In this blog, we will break down the difference between customer service and customer success, and how both of them work in tandem to build a great CX.
What is customer service?
Customer service is the frontline department of any organization that ensures customer satisfaction by troubleshooting doubts and questions users face. Most of the time, support requests are raised by customers during times of technical difficulties or general product roadblocks.
Customer service reps can use conversational AI tools like chatbots and voicebots to ensure punctual resolutions. This saves them time as they can now focus and deal with more complex issues. All in all, customer service teams ensure product utility stays unhindered for customers.
What is customer success?
Customer success teams help users leverage the most out of a product offering to reach users’ business goals or personal goals in the case of B2C. Customer success involves understanding problems businesses are trying to solve, and gauging how the product(s) can maximize their ROI. It involves building long-term user relationships with the aim of maximizing customer lifetime value by consistently providing value throughout their journeys.
Customer service vs customer success: What is the difference between customer service and customer success?
Customer service and customer success functions complement each other. Only when both of them work in synergy and in perfect harmony that a good customer experience occurs. But what is that sets them apart? How are these two functions correlated, yet very distinct from each other? Let’s get down to it.
Interaction duration
Customer service is independent in its action. A customer service team works to solve issues, questions and doubts to ensure users can seamlessly derive utility from a product. The interaction could be before a user converts, during the speculative stage, or post-sales. These conversations come to an end as soon as the problem at hand is resolved.
Customer success on the other hand is a lot more exhaustive. It takes into account a user’s complete buyer journey with a brand and the resultant customer experience during this time. Customer success has a wider dispersion and the effect is quantified over a period of time, as the process is continuous and evolving. The impact is long-term.
Approach
Most customer support interactions are reactive in nature. When a customer faces a hiccup and raises a concern with a business, customer service gets into action. The approach is more real-time solution-oriented, in which the TAT and future recurrence of the issue is minimized.
Customer success takes a deeper dive into building cohesive, sustainable relationships with customers. Customer success teams proactively reach out to users in order to identify areas of improvement and bridge solution gaps in the relevant context. As the name suggests, the agenda here is to provide value and utility to ensure success for users at every pivot in their journeys.
Framework and skillset
As we all know, customer service as a function exists for as long as commerce has. People have always reached out to businesses to solve their problems. So, it’s only natural for the function to have outlined protocols and skills needed to excel at it. As an established field, customer service is an easier nut to crack.
There’s a plethora of standard customer support practices that most businesses use, so scouting for talent to fit the bill is more defined. Representatives need to be polite, helpful, and patient. Support agents need to always be ready to face uncertainty and volatile customers. Time-bound efficiency plays a big role since it’s important for agents to swiftly resolve queries to avoid customers coming back with the same issues.
On the other hand, customer success is relatively a newer field with loosely defined goals and peripheral understanding. The existing function of customer success is less mature, which makes hiring the right talent to lead it trickier. Customer success agents need to have a panoramic view of customer journeys. They must possess the skills like empathy, articulation, critical thinking, and negotiation to ensure intact customer relationships. They must have a better presence of mind and a deeper insight into their products.
Tracking and KPI measurement
Both of these functions have their own aims to achieve. Customer service mostly deals with specific problems that can be easily resolved with speed and quality. So, quantifying the impact these experiences make is relatively simpler through a myriad of metrics and ratios.
Some of these metrics are,
First Response Time:
FRT measures the time it takes for a response from customer support the first time a user raises a ticket.
Average Resolution Time:
ART helps you evaluate how much time it takes for customer support to resolve a ticket.
Customer Satisfaction:
Your CSAT measures just how happy and satisfied are your users with your service.
Escalation Rate:
You wouldn’t want more tickets to be escalated to a higher authority, right? This KPI helps you figure out the percentage of total tickets that get escalated further.
Customer success, here, makes things a bit complicated. Since the impact of an accumulated customer experience is long-term, it’s not as easily calculable. The aim isn’t to fix problems in real-time, but to generate ROI through continuing user rapport. Customer success deals with what happens after conversion. And so, the ensuing effect can be presently measured through long-term KPIs like retention rates, repeat purchases, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Winning together: How can customer service and customer success work in tandem?
Continuous customer success reach outs and successful ticket resolutions ensure a happy user. To delight users, it’s important for both functions to work together. Customer service and customer success teams should have easy access to stored user data at any point during user interactions. Having a one-point view for all can help agents fetch helpful information at the right time. Support agents can use the data to resolve queries more efficiently, whereas customer success teams can study these instances to pitch relevant product offerings.
Both functions also need to know when to react or be the first to reach out. For example, whether a user needs a better subscription plan or fixes in the present one, your teams should be en-garde. Teams can read into data to know the relevant course of action.
On one hand, when service agents educate the user about a product, it makes work simpler for customer success agents. When a user is already inclined towards making a decision, relevant interjection can give them the push to convert.
Build great user experiences with smart customer service
Delivering good customer support is vital for businesses today. It’s these short, transactional interactions that truly add up to define their overall experience with you. To ensure both customer support and customer success teams can work together to build wholesome journeys for users, conversational AI can lend a hand. Use Chat360’s chatbot solution to connect and engage with your audience. Redefine CX with an all-in-one AI solution today. Sign up now!
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